Bower – Useful Package Manager Tool
bower package manager

How to speed up and simplify developers’ work? Of course, first of all, you need to improve your knowledge of the major languages and frameworks needed for your projects. Your knowledge is your best assistant. Apart from this, there are plenty of seemingly minor, but nonetheless, very useful tools that can make developers’ life easier.

One of these tools is Bower. It is a package manager. There are many frameworks that are used on different projects. When a project is overloaded with frameworks, a package manager gives a helping hand. It simplifies the installation and updating of project dependencies (i.e. third-party libraries that the project uses).

The developer who uses Bower can forget about:

  • Spending time searching for the correct version of the library;
  • Updating library version;
  • Copying libraries from project to project.

Bower depends on Node.js and npm. The installation process is simple:

npm install -g bower

Now, if you want to install jQuery, you don’t need to visit an official website, find, download and install it. You only need to run this:

bower install jquery

The latest version of jQuery will be automatically installed.

If you don’t know the exact name of required package, you can use “search” command, f.e.:

bower search breakpoint

Run bower list command to see all installed packages.

Bower is good for its approach for installing package dependencies. It sets each package once, so you will have jQuery only in one folder, regardless of the number of dependencies. It also helps to avoid conflicts of versions. Bower simply will not allow you to install a version that is incompatible with already installed.

This tool is not universal. It’s more suitable for those who need to maintain and update the front end part. For example, if there are two separate teams working on the project (one on the front end part, and the second – on the back end part).

Bower’s official website – bower.io.

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